1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a storage device having an operating system stored therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
Several operating system activation methods and devices utilizing such activation methods have been proposed.
In order to assure the security, these conventional methods and devices typically perform authentication at the time of activation of an operating system (hereafter may be abbreviated as ‘OS’). Some processing is then required for a storage unit with a BIOS or an OS stored therein. One available technique for the enhanced security is providing an additional function of prohibiting activation of the OS until successful boot-time authentication for a boot program of a hard disk. This conventional technique, however, readily analyze information stored in a hard disk when the hard disk is recognized as a slave hard disk of another computer.
Another available technique for the enhanced security is encrypting the whole storage of a hard disk. Such encryption, however, requires development of an exclusive hard disk driver corresponding to each OS. The resulting dependency on the OS or the hardware configuration may, however, have some disadvantages, for example, the lowered performance and the difficulty in encrypting the whole storage of the hard disk. Still another available technique for the enhanced security is providing the BIOS with an additional authentication function at the time of activation of an OS and locking the storage of the hard disk itself with an ATA (advanced technology attachment) security command. This technique is, however, not applicable to the existing computers having the BIOS implemented without the additional authentication function at the time of activation of the OS. The BIOS-based authentication is not performable in combination with physical authentication utilizing, for example, an external storage medium. This technique accordingly has a possibility of failed protection of information stored in the hard disk in the event of leakage or decoding of a password.